Bilgrami's critique of the Platonistic urge (or: why reject the very idea of semantic normativity?)

The previous post was a bit of a bear, wasn't it. (By the way, if you liked it, you may vote for it here - once they work out the bugs, that is.) Let's back up a bit, and see if we can't get clearer on the various players. The dialectic here is quite complicated, with strange bedfellows all over the place, and a number of distinct yet overlapping positions on the issue(s). (When we get back to vagueness, we'll see that there too the teams have a somewhat unusual alignment, which is what provoked Marinus's remarks about Wittgenstein in the LL post.)

Why would anyone deny that there were linguistic norms? If there were no such norms, it is easy to assume, there would be no constraint on meaning. An agent could mean anything by anything, simply by intending to do so (that is, that whatever "norms" constrained his meanings – if we still want to call them "norms" at all – are merely "internal"). But maybe this is correct. This position is called "internalism" or "individualism," and its Cartesian flavor is undeniable, thus attracting criticism from all across the philosophical spectrum (including from closet or residual Cartesians themselves). Rejecting internalism seems to require that there be external linguistic norms, and thus that I can make errors in meaning as determined by others.

But what is it to make an "error in meaning"? On one view, whenever I refer to an ocelot as a lynx, I make an error in judgment (i.e. get the world wrong/say something false), and in so doing, I misuse the word "lynx," which should only be applied to lynxes, and I thus "use the word wrongly" in this way. What determines that this is the "wrong" use of the word? Answer: linguistic rules ("norms"). Among those who take this view, there is some variation about what constitutes the linguistic norms in question: obviously other English speakers have something to do with it, but there is also some role to be played by ocelots and lynxes themselves (what role this is exactly will depend on how you feel about natural kinds and Kripkean metaphysical realism more generally).

Now we can respond to this conception of meaning errors in a few ways. A natural way is to object to a conflation between two cases: 1) using a word "wrongly" (coming out with the wrong fusebox), and 2) using it correctly to express what happens to be a false belief (I perfectly correctly characterize how things appear to me, but as it happens I am mistaken). In one sense, Davidsonians will be happy to make this distinction, as one of their (our) main concerns here is the holism of belief and meaning: that in attributing the two together, we have some interpretive leeway (or even indeterminacy) in saying what falls under what. This doesn't mean there are *no* constraints on interpretation – that someone's meaning may swing free entirely from what both subject and interpreter see as observable evidence for it; it just means that we have a better sense of how content is attributed in interpretation than do those with non-Davidsonian accounts of meaning.

However, even after distinguishing in this way, the question remains how to characterize the first case (and the sense of "correctly" in the second). We are nowhere near out of the woods. It can be a further Davidsonian point that we fall directly back into the Platonistic soup if in making this distinction we carve out a realm of purely or sui generis semantic normativity, or in other words, those same "linguistic norms." On this view, we need nothing so robust (or theoretically questionable) as linguistic normativity so construed to account for the actual constraints we make on meaning attribution. We can perfectly well, for example, think of such "mistakes" as prudential ones, in which the sound I make is inconveniently chosen to convey my perfectly determinate (and indeed often perfectly intelligible) meaning – a prudential "error," not a contravening of "linguistic norms" in the disputed sense.

This is the point Bilgrami is making in "Norms and Meaning," in which he criticizes Kripke and Burge, not for opposing "internalism" or "individualism" per se, but for not getting at the root of the problem, and thus perpetuating it in a new form. In hurrying to explain my attempted moderation of Bilgrami's rejection of semantic normativity, I kind of skipped over his reasons for rejecting it in the first place. So let me go back and say more about that.

In Kripke's and Burge's discussions, the "individualist" is pretty much someone with a "private language," someone whose inner intentions determine his meanings no matter what other people say, which is why the issue comes up in Kripke's book on Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. Naturally Wittgenstein rejects this view; and so does Kripke, who takes the RFC (whether or not Wittgenstein himself does so) to require an appeal to a "social theory of meaning" to save us from the meaning-skeptical paradoxes to which "individualism" so construed famously leads. On Kripke's picture, if we are to account for meaning at all, *something* must provide the norms manifested in linguistic rules. In distancing itself from mere linguistic nihilism, individualism promises to locate the source of normativity in the speaker's linguistic dispositions. However, as the paradoxes show, such dispositions cannot do this, as they are compatible with *any* subsequent behavior. Nor, Kripke argues (following Wittgenstein at least this far), can we find the source in Platonistic "rigid rails" or whatnot; so "[w]hat then can the source of the desired normativity be but the social element?" ("Norms and Meaning," p. 126). The result is Kripke's "skeptical solution" to the meaning-skeptical paradox, an appeal to the dispositions of the surrounding linguistic community.

However, Bilgrami rejects this forced choice (dare I say "dualism"?) between anything-goes-if-I-say-so "individualism" on the one hand and external linguistic normativity on the other, such that we must locate a source for it in this way. Bilgrami frequently qualifies his criticism of Kripke and Burge, rejecting normativity "in the sense demanded by" K/B, or "such" normativity. (This is what encourages me to risk re-expansion of the concept into the semantic realm, or that is, recognizing a properly semantic component to our normative commitments.) Yet he is determined to pull the objectionable picture out by the roots, and takes so doing to require a stronger line against "linguistic norms" than has seemed feasible until Davidson's criticism.

Bilgrami's diagnosis goes like this:

[I]n rejecting the abstractions and metaphor of [platonistic] Meanings and 'rails' on the one hand and the internalistic mentalism of inner facts of the matter on the other, one has not yet succeeded in rejecting what in Platonism underlies the search for these things being rejected. Without rejecting this deeper urge, one will no doubt find another such thing to gratify the Platonist urge and indeed one has found it in society. This deeper urge underlying Platonism is precisely the drive to see concepts and terms as governed by such normativity. (p. 127)

John McDowell has of course also criticized Kripke's diagnosis and attempted solution to the paradoxes. In particular, McDowell too criticizes Kripke on his own terms - that his "skeptical solution," locating semantic norms in community practice, fails to do what it promises. And he too wants to dissolve the problem and allay the skeptical anxiety, just as does Bilgrami, only without giving up semantic normativity entirely. It is in trying make sense of McDowell's approach not only to this issue, but to normativity generally (especially in response to Davidson), that I am motivated to moderate Bilgrami's flat rejection of semantic normativity in the way I did the other day.

But let's see what Bilgrami says about McDowell. According to Bilgrami, McDowell says

that the way Kripke brings in the social is just an extension of the normativity-denying position of the dispositionalist because all Kripke does is bring in the dispositions of other members of society to account for an individual's meanings. So if he says something was missing in the individual dispositionalist account in the first place, then it will be missing in the social extension as well. This criticism seems to me to be fair enough, if one accepts the normativity demand as one finds it in Kripke and as one finds it in these others who think that Kripke has himself failed to live up to that demand. But I do not accept the demand in the first place. So mine is a much more fundamental criticism of Kripke. In my view, one should repudiate the 'Platonism' altogether (even in its ersatz forms) and in so doing give notions like meaning and concepts a much lower profile, whereby it does not matter very much that one is not able to say [referring here to the familiar examples in Kripke and Burge] that KWert is making a [properly semantic, or as Bilgrami puts it, "intrinsic lexical"] mistake on January 1st 1990 or that Burge's protagonist has all along made a mistake when he applies the term to a condition in his thigh. [...] [I]t makes no difference to anything at all, which answer we give. His behaviour is equally well explained no matter what we say. There is no problem, skeptical or otherwise. (p. 128)

Because of the holism of belief and meaning, we can attribute either concept, adjusting the belief component accordingly, and equally well explain the agent's behavior, which is after all the constitutive function of interpretation in the first place. This is the sense in which Bilgrami's is a Davidsonian view (and in response to this article, Davidson agrees heartily).

In this sense, again, I have no problem with this view. However, I think that here too (that is, w/r/t this view itself) we have other options in explaining the anti-Platonism we are after, options which leave the concept (or again, *a* concept) of "properly semantic normativity" in place. I was no doubt remiss in the previous post not to stress that it is only after the point has been understood that we safely can go on and try to accommodate McDowell's way of talking, with its characteristic stress on normative rather than (as readers of Mind and World will recognize as the criticism of Davidson there on analogous grounds) "merely causal" (or again, descriptive) relations between mental contents and the world they are about. When we do this we can see how McDowell's criticism can be properly directed. Davidson is not making a "Platonistic" error, as Kripke et. al. are, but in recoiling to a picture devoid of properly semantic normativity (properly construed), he misses a chance to tell a better story about normative commitment generally speaking, and thus recover gracefully from the error he really does make which results in his "coherentism," dismissed by McDowell as "frictionless spinning in a void" (again, see Mind and World, esp. ch. 1-2). I hope that helps place the other post in dialectical space (if not actually vindicate what I say there, and I still have some more fast talking to do on that score as well).

Okay, that's enough for Bilgrami. Next time: Davidson.

Davidson and Gadamer

Recently a few friends stopped by to discuss Davidson, and Clark brought up Derrida's criticism of Gadamer, which he thought might be similar to Dummett's criticism of Davidson (i.e., as committed to something unpleasant or other, I didn't really get it). We ended up talking past each other – I don't get Derrida at all – but I did want to say a few things about the comparison on the one end between Davidson and Gadamer.

I imagine that some of our trouble came from the fact, as I did mention in that discussion, that Derrida's criticism is directed at Gadamer, not Davidson, so it's not really appropriate to speak Davidsonian in response, as I was doing. The similarities between the two are undeniable, but of course that doesn't make the two positions identical. In his article in Gadamer's Century, McDowell defends the two against charges of relativism, of which he takes them both to be innocent for pretty much the same reasons, and so in that context it's easy to elide the differences and just regard Gadamer as one of the good guys. I shouldn't do that.

But as Clark was describing it, Derrida's charge seems not to be one of relativism, but instead of dogmatism. Where we assume that communication is successful (such that our task is to explain how such a thing is possible), it may yet be that there is instead a "radical rupture" of some (necessarily) mysterious kind. This claim sounds to me like the ontological cum semantic equivalent of Cartesian radical epistemological doubt: offended by our seeming complacency concerning the apparent smoothness of typical conversation, the skeptical soixante-huitard imp hops in with dire warnings of ruptures and fissures and cracks, oh my!

Naturally Davidson comes in for a version of these charges as well (if not from Dummett; cf. Stroud and C. McGinn, who reject, on Cartesian grounds, the anti-skeptical consequences of Davidson's account of interpretation and belief), but Gadamer's case is a bit different. From Habermas, as one might expect, the charge against Gadamer took a characteristic form: if our conception of an objective world is limited by our cultural/linguistic horizons, then we won't have the detachment necessary to perform Critique. We dogmatically assume the world is as we have traditionally construed it, and even when we open our horizons up to achieve Horizontverschmelzung (I love that word) with the Other, we still don't acknowledge the absolute otherness of the objective world: now we both "could be wrong" about it. (Or something like that; I can go look.) Incidentally, people have been known to say the same thing about Wittgenstein, or at least "Winchgenstein."

But now two things occur to me about that. First, that accusation does indeed sound like Stroud's criticism of Davidson. And second, this criticism is pretty similar to that directed at Gadamer's supposed relativism (think, for example, of the various definitions – that is, by opponents – of "historicism"): Gadamer is held to claim that our beliefs are culturally determined (dogmatism), so the denizens of the various cultures never reach out to an objective world, rendering them equal in their futility (relativism). This makes sense, in that that Janus-faced flaw is absent from Davidson and (as I've been able to read him so far) Gadamer as well, and telling the proper story about interpretation can bring both of these things out at the same time (as in McDowell's article). I mean, seriously, if Gadamer were really interested simply in retreating from realism to relativism, Truth and Method wouldn't need to be 600 pages long. The tough part is drawing the proper consequences from a) the linguistic structure of cultural tradition and b) the plurality of same in a single objective world. The optimistic thought of Davidsonian Gadamerians is that T & M contains a helpful post-Heideggerian analogue to Davidson's rejection of the scheme-content dualism. But I haven't even read it, so I wouldn't know. (Maybe Malpas's article in Gadamer's Century can tell us.)

Still, if Derrida's criticism were similar to Habermas's, then maybe Gadamer would have said so (and thus not respond, as Daniel paraphrases him in comments, with "Huh?"). But I've never read that exchange, as I've heard before that it was a total train wreck.

Plummeting doves and other disasters

Currence likes Kant's famous comment in the Introduction
to the first Critique (A5/B8):

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would still be easier in empty space.

Currence comments: "Talk about frictionless spinning in the void." This is of course a reference to McDowell's criticism of Davidson's "coherentism" in Mind and World. Interesting connection, and the image is certainly similar in the obvious way, but I'm actually put in mind of two other images which I think are more closely related than McDowell's to the point Kant is making here. (McDowell is accusing Davidson of succumbing to a dualism of reason and nature, but I don't think he takes him to do so because of this particular bird-brained inference, even if we can describe in similar terms the unfortunate dualistic result. For further thoughts on this matter see Daniel's post here, which just appeared while I was writing this.)

The first image is from Wittgenstein. The line of thought extends back several sections, so to see what he's after let's join in at §94 (I've altered the translation slightly):

"A proposition is a remarkable thing!" Here we have in a nutshell the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts. Or even to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves. [...]

The first quarter or so of Philosophical Investigations is often regarded as preliminary throat-clearing, in which the mature Wittgenstein criticizes his former self, clearing the rubble away before getting on to his real arguments, about rule-following, "private" language, aspect-seeing, and other topics in mind and language. But "clearing the rubble" (as in §118) is how Wittgenstein describes his entire project, not just its unavoidable preliminaries. These earlier sections are not mere preliminaries, but are instead the beating heart of the book. The later sections, while important, are where Wittgenstein unpacks what he has already said and applies it to particular cases (which are themselves carefully chosen to reinforce the earlier points about language – that is, they're not merely applications of a supposedly already established general principle).

In fact, Wittgenstein mentions his former self only rarely. Yet it is true that that philosopher comes in for some pointed criticism here. Putting aside, if we can, the vexed question of whether the rejected view is a) false or b) nonsensical (and the equally vexed question of how exactly the criticized author of the Tractatus would himself regard these words!), let's look at how Wittgenstein characterizes the "illusion" which tempts us here (§97):

[Thought's] essence, logic, presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it.——It must rather be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus No. 5.5563).

Just so you don't have to look it up, 5.5563 reads:

In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.—That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety.
(Our problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are.)

Note that the first sentence there is something that the later Wittgenstein as well is concerned to stress [e.g. PI §98] – but he draws from it a quite different moral: not that in order to account for this everyday order we must posit [what he later calls, farther on in PI §97] a single ideal "super-order," but instead that when we are "dazzled by the ideal" in this way, we "therefore fail to see the actual [i.e. varied] use of the word [e.g.] "game" correctly." (§100).

This sets up (as I've bolded below) the famous image I wanted to mention as an interesting comparison to Kant's, in §107:

The more narrowly we examine actual language [searching for the elusive ideal order], the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement [impressed upon us, Wittgenstein believes, by our having "predicate[d] of the thing what lies in the method of representation" (§104)].) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.—We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

(We've all seen that last injunction many times, but rarely, I think, with its proper force.) In any case, we might just as well say "We want to fly: so we need wind resistance. Back to the dense air!"

What I find particularly interesting here is that Wittgenstein and Kant strike upon such similar images in talking about what might seem to be rather different things. What this means, I take it, is that the error, the temptation, which they both aim to combat is so ingrained in our ways of talking and thinking that it manifests itself whenever we look to obtain a reflective perspective on them.

The second image returns us to a context which is (in one way anyway) more like Kant's than Wittgensein's. We find it in the "'Reason' in Philosophy" section of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche has just condemned everybody from the Eleatics through (what was then) last Tuesday for rejecting the testimony of the senses as an unreliable guide to really real reality, and he's still not finished with his denunciations. His ultimate target here is the First Cause, but in context the particular gripe looks to me the same as Kant's and Wittgenstein's: he laments our instinctive urge to prioritize, reify, and detach the abstract and general and necessary from the concrete and specific and contingent. (Of course, on most interpretations we find some inconsistency in Kant on this point; but in his comments immediately following the line about the poor dove, Kant explicitly mentions that this is what happens when "Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding").

Anyway, here's Nietzsche:

The other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the end—unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!—namely, the "highest concepts," which means the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning. This again is nothing but their way of showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower, may not have grown at all. [...]

When we are concerned to grasp (only) the purest essence of concepts, we do not simply fail to do so (as if it simply eluded our clumsy grasp, like the "torn spider web" Wittgenstein has us trying to repair with our fingers in PI §106); indeed, even "success" in this endeavor, were we able to make sense of it at all, would merely capture, not reality at its highest, but its exact opposite: "the last smoke of evaporating reality." Here again, as in the other images, we see the (if you'll pardon the expression) essential perversity of the platonistic and/or Cartesian ideal – which is of course a theme on which Nietzsche plays many variations throughout his writings.

No fool of a Took

You may have heard about Robert Pippin's recent exchange with McDowell in the European Journal of Philosophy. Well now Professor P. has put the relevant pdf's on his website, including the Postscript to "Leaving Nature Behind" (his contribution to Reading McDowell) which is his response to McD's response in that book. So it goes

1. P: "Leaving Nature Behind" in Smith 2002
2. M: "Responses" in Smith 2002
3. P: "Postscript"
4. M: "On Pippin's Postscript"
5. P: "McDowell's Germans"
6. M: "Oh yeah? Sez you! (Pbbbbbt!)"

Okay, I made that last one up. Some heady stuff there! You may want to skim the B Deduction first. (There's an oxymoron for you: "skim the B Deduction".)

Here's a taste from #4, where McDowell lays it on the line:

The result of [what he's just been saying] is no longer Kantian in any but the thinnest sense. But that is no threat to anything I think. My proposal — whose shape I took from Pippin — was that we can understand at least some aspects of Hegelian thinking in terms of a radicalization of Kant. The radicalization need not be accessible to someone who would still be recognizably Kant. It is enough if there is a way to arrive at a plausibly Hegelian stance by reflecting on the upshot of the Deduction. It is no problem for this that, as I am suggesting, this reflection undermines the very need for a Transcendental Deduction — provided such a result emerges intelligibly from considering what is promising and what is unsatisfactory in Kant’s effort.

McDowell (and Cavell) on criteria and skepticism

The other day, Currence reported on Ed Witherspoon's talk entitled "Wittgensteinian Criteria and the Problem of Other Minds." In his post, he wondered

how Witherspoon's discussion of Wittgenstein on criteria and whether he was a McDowellian or a Cavellian -- or whether it makes a substantial difference if they're essentially the same -- ties in at all to the discussion of two kinds of skepticism, except that Witherspoon thought Wittgenstein took himself to be addressing both kinds of skepticism.

Here are some thoughts of mine on that subject which I hope will be of some use. (You should probably read his post first, if you haven't already.)

Let me start with the intuitive motivation for skepticism. When the evidence points to something, the natural thing to do (the everyday thing, the default thing) is to believe it ( = take it to be true). If one finds the evidence insufficient, one suspends judgment; but that's not philosophical skepticism. The philosophical skeptic is the guy who says "sure, I don't have any problem with your evidence – it looks that way to me too, so I'm not asking for more or better evidence – but still, we might be wrong; so we better not say we know." In other words, we are fallible, in that perfectly compelling appearances can cause us to believe falsely; the skeptical conclusion is that in every case, we cannot know if this is one of those times, so we must therefore suspend judgment on the truth or falsity of (possibly "mere") appearances, no matter how compelling they may be.

In addressing this "scandal for philosophy," Kant diagnosed it as a variant of a much deeper problem. If subject and object are so radically distinct as to threaten the former's knowledge of the latter, as the Cartesian insists, it seems that this metaphysical gap threatens our ability not only to know, but even to think about the world. This "Kantian skepticism," as Conant terms it (as we will see if that darn book of his ever comes out), addresses the Cartesian confidence in the possibility of contentful yet radically false "appearances". Turning it around, we may say that if we are in close enough contact with the world to form contentful thoughts about how it might be, then the Cartesian epistemological scruples are pointless. You may of course bite the bullet and try to deny that your thoughts have content; but then why should I listen to your self-admittedly meaningless babble?

In the contemporary context, after the linguistic turn, we speak not simply of contentful thought but also of meaningful assertion. This is where "criteria" come in. The idea of appealing to criteria in replying to epistemological skepticism is to add to the original reason for belief (i.e. that the evidence points to the truth of P) the idea that to take P as true in such situations just is to use the term correctly. After all, generally speaking, that's how we learn the term in the first place: in the (apparent) presence of a yellow banana, nanny says "look at the nice yellow banana!", and we say "yehw bana," and so on (this is not to commit oneself to the "Augustinian" picture of the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations, but to the manifest facts which make that picture seem obligatory). Once we have learned the relevant terms, to withhold assent to "there's a yellow banana" in such situations is not to show virtuous epistemic scruple, as the skeptic has it, but instead to show vicious semantic incompetence. That's the thought anyway (and there is indeed something like this in Wittgenstein; the question is what exactly).

However, as both Cavell and McDowell point out, it would be wrong to suggest that "criteria" get you across the skeptical gap. When we answer the skeptical challenge, saying that we (do too) know that P because the criterion is satisfied, there are two ways in which the epistemic chain may yet break. First, the criteria for asserting P might actually apply, but fail to entail P; or the criterion indeed entails P, but we cannot know whether it actually applies here (that is, whether the "appearance" that P is veridical). We cannot have both, on pain of dogmatism. Our manifest fallibility is as undeniable a fact as any.

Where does this leave us? Putting Wittgenstein himself to one side for now, let's compare Cavell and McDowell. According to Currence, Witherspoon suggested at the talk that the two views differ mainly in a terminological difference between them concerning the term "criterion." McDowell takes the satisfaction of criteria for X to entail the truth of X, but allows that we can take criteria to be satisfied even when they are not, while Cavell goes the other way: criteria themselves can mislead us, but we can and do know when they obtain. In any case, both reject the "criterial theorist's" view that criteria take one across the skeptical gap. So they agree; but even so, this difference reflects an important difference in emphasis and strategy, in explaining which I think we can make helpful reference to the various types of skepticism, on the one hand, and that confusing talk about types of doubt (and whether LW was a "fallibilist") on the other. In any case that's what I'll try to do here.

Let's start with McDowell. One of McDowell's consistent concerns – becoming more explicit in his recent work on Kant and Hegel – has been to reject the Cartesian metaphysical opposition between subject and object, which is the source and stay of the corresponding epistemological skepticism. In Mind and World (MW), pressing the "Kantian skeptic" line (though not in those terms), he insists, following Wittgenstein, that the content of our concepts is not confined to the subjective side of the Cartesian gap, but instead "[does] not stop anywhere short of the fact" [PI §95]. In contemporary terms (MW p. 27):

[T]here is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. [...] Of course thought can be distanced from the world by being false, but there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought.

The idea, then, is that when we turn to the more fundamental semantic consequences of radical subject-object dualism, the familiar fact of human fallibility no longer even seems to have the epistemological significance the skeptic claims it does. This can thus help us resist a perennial philosophical temptation, viz., to metaphysicalize that innocent epistemic gap and identify it with that same picture's supposed ontological gap between subject and object (thus reinforcing it, as well as the resulting skepticism). If we do this, when we turn back to epistemology, the Cartesian argument "effects a transition from sheer fallibility (which might be registered in a 'Pyrrhonian' scepticism) to a 'veil of ideas' scepticism" ["Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge" [CDK] p. 386n).

Here's how that works. The skeptical argument gets its traction from the idea that deceptive appearance and veridical manifestation are phenomenologically indistinguishable, and thus that "one's experiential intake—what one embraces within the scope of one's consciousness—must be the same in both kinds of case" [CDK p. 386] That "highest common factor" [HCF] between the deceptive and veridical cases is thus essentially incapable of providing evidence for one or the other. The difference between the two cases is something extra: the actual connection to the world which makes the veridical case veridical. But ex hypothesi we cannot tell which is which; the world's contribution to the veridical case, on this view, is "blankly external" to our experience.

But as we have seen, McDowell disputes the idea that the content of our experience must be construed as an HCF in this way. When I lack an actual connection to the world, it's not that my contentful perceptual experience was deceptive, but instead that I haven't had a perceptual experience at all, only an illusion of one. (I have conflated them here, but as I read it, the connection to the somewhat different linguistic version of this thought is this. My illusion of perceptual experience can result in my having a mistaken but contentful thought if on other occasions I have indeed had (veridical) perceptual experiences in the course of learning and using the concepts which make it up. The virtue of McDowell's focus on the perceptual-experience aspect instead of the contentful-concept aspect of his picture is that the latter, like Davidson's holistic view, makes it look as if it is only global skepticism which it renders ineffective: this thought can be a contentful mistake only if not all of them are. That is of course true too; but the perceptual-experience version is more powerful – and its metaphysical import more directly anti-dualistic – in that it applies even to single cases.)

McDowell's alternative conception of perceptual experience is "disjunctive":

[A]n appearance that such-and-such is the case can be either a mere appearance or the fact that such-and-such is the case making itself perceptually manifest to someone. [CDK p. 387]

I either have a perceptual connection to the world or I do not. Let's say it seems to me that I see a cat. Either I do, and a cat has manifested itself in my experience – a veridical appearance – or there is no cat to be seen. In neither case is there an epistemological or metaphysical "intermediary" (either standing between me and the cat, on the one hand, or disguising its actual absence, on the other), in the manner of the HCF.

When a fact is perceptually manifest to one, saying or believing that it is is thus guaranteed to be true, and thus, in the skeptical context, a "criterion" of truth (though of course we may not take advantage of this fact: McDowell is careful to identify manifestation with the availability of knowledge, not its achievement, as even a veridical appearance may not lead to belief (perhaps because of skeptical scruple!)). Of course the skeptic, suspicious of this talk of epistemic "guarantees," makes the natural objection, as if McDowell were trying to sweep our fallibility under the rug in order to meet the skeptical challenge. This distinction, he says, doesn't help; the fact remains that we can't tell when we are deceived.

But McDowell's concern is not to deny epistemic fallibility, but to render it epistemologically, and thus metaphysically, uninteresting. His strategy is thus inherently anti-skeptical, affirming knowledge in the face of skeptical doubt. The skeptic can extract a concession that there remains a sense in which we cannot know when we are deceived (after all, to deny this is to deny that deception is even possible). Even where we are most sure, he says, we must leave room for doubt. But if this be doubt, it is an uninteresting – or perhaps "weak" or "imaginary" or "possible" – doubt, a mere footnote to our firm affirmation of belief. I am certain – beyond present doubt – that I am sitting before the fire at my computer; but every such belief is corrigible, in that I grant the conceptual, if not actual (or, as some pragmatists say, "serious") possibility of error. Give me more evidence, and I may come to change my view (so while I may be completely certain, I'm not "absolutely" certain – like I care about that anyway). That's all the "doubt" that human fallibility gets you – and it's not enough to underwrite a seriously skeptical position.

Currence reports that here was some discussion of this point at Witherspoon's talk:

Witherspoon did make a really odd claim, however, that everyone (Conant, Finkelstein, grad students) picked on during the discussion after the talk: Wittgenstein was a fallibilist. He said this in the context of a distinction he drew between "weak doubt" and "strong doubt". He switched between "weak doubt" and "imaginable doubt". This seemed massively confused to everyone; if being a fallibilist means no more than recognizing one has been wrong about things before, then every reasonable person is a fallibilist, and the claim is uninteresting. If, however, being a fallibilist means something substantial -- and I think it does, something along the lines of making intelligible assertions like 'I am justified in believing x, but I could be wrong' -- then Wittgenstein is about the last person I'd want to say was a fallibilist.

Conant made this point through a humorous example in which someone doubts that the room is not safe, saying, "This room is not safe!"; we ask, "Why isn't the room safe?", and they respond, "I don't know, it's just not!"; we wouldn't say they've offered a doubt at all. "Chicken Little worries" do not fall under the genus "doubt", and it is a sham to call them "weak" or "imaginary" or "possible" doubts.

My first reaction to this was that I don't see why anyone (anyone in that room, anyway) should be surprised if Wittgenstein thinks it important to stress something which "every reasonable person" believes, and which would thus constitute an "uninteresting" claim. On some views, that's all he ever does. But let's let that go.

Conant's Chicken Little example looks weird to me. (I assume that there is a typo here, and that it should be "doubts that the room is safe," not "not safe".) If someone says "This room is not safe!", he is indeed doubting that the room is safe; but he's also claiming that it isn't, which is not a skeptical thing to do. Chicken Little acted on his belief, insisting that the King be notified that the sky was falling. We have no difficulty attributing belief to him (and thus actual doubt about our safety). In fact his problem is not skepticism but gullibility, and our proper response to him is itself skeptical (i.e. garden-variety rather than philosophical): his evidence – a conk on the bean (or "I don't know, it just is") – is insufficient for such a remarkable claim. So Conant is right that this shouldn't count as "doubt" in the relevant sense; but that's only because it's a belief and thus not relevant to the issue of skeptical doubt. In particular, that's not what I take to be the point of talk of "weak" or "imaginary" or "possible" doubt.

The more relevant case, it seems, is this. I say, or assume, that the room is safe, but our friend demurs. Unlike Chicken Little, though, he is perfectly happy to remain here with us. Practically speaking, he says, the evidence is sufficient to warrant staying; yet he prefers (he says) to suspend judgment on the truth of "the room is safe," for familiar skeptical reasons: if we were deceived, and poison gas were about to seep from the ventilation, killing us all, things would look exactly as they do now. There's no evidence that this will happen, so there's no reason to leave. But we cannot claim knowledge that the room is safe.

This is what Peirce calls "paper doubt": philosophically motivated (e.g. Cartesian) demurral, conspicuously not backed up by action. You say you are in doubt; but you not only show no intention to leave the room (as you would if you were actually in doubt about your safety), but you're not even trying to allay your alleged doubt through inquiry. In claiming to doubt, you are simply registering your fallibility and drawing what seems to you to be the proper philosophical conclusion. But purported doubt (or belief), which has no connection with inquiry and deliberation is not doubt (belief) at all. The problem is not that the "doubter" cannot support his purported doubt, but that given his actions there's no reason, beyond his mere assertion, to attribute it to him at all. So the Chicken Little case is not germane. No-one denies that C. L. actually believes the sky is falling (and thus doubts that we are safe); it's the best way to explain his actions, including his urgent desire to see the King.

"Weak doubt" is not a good word for the bare concession of fallibility, but there's nothing wrong with "possible" as opposed to "actual" doubt (again, pragmatists oppose "theoretical" to "serious" possibility of error; it is when the former aspires to the latter condition that they (we) expose it as "paper doubt"). As for what Wittgenstein thought, that's a thorny issue. His reflections on these and related matters in On Certainty are inconclusive at best. I do agree, though, that simply to state that he was a "fallibilist" (not that that simple view is Witherspoon's) is highly misleading. But I won't get into it here.

I've already gone on for ages, so let me defer extended discussion of Cavell's position. I'll just finish the comparison with McDowell re: skepticism and criteria. As we saw, Cavell too concedes the failure of criteria to bridge the skeptical gap. But his philosophical strategy is very different from McDowell (even while sharing a great deal, in Wittgenstein and out). I quote from the back cover of Richard Eldridge's Cavell volume in the "Contemporary Philosophy in Focus" series:

At the core of [Cavell's] thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory [i.e. "constructive philosophy"] but a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others, and of the external world that must be accepted. Developing the resources of ordinary language philosophy and the discourse of thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Thoreau, and Emerson, Cavell has explored the ineliminability of skepticism in philosophy, literature, drama, and the movies.

It's a good collection (check the link for an irresistible used price!), but unfortunately there's no article devoted to Cavell's views on skepticism in particular. Anyway, where McDowell as well as Cavell grants human fallibility (where the "criterial theorists" had no room for it, as the skeptic shows), the former shrugs it off as uninteresting, on the way to reaffirming our metaphysical and epistemological connections to the world, while the latter instead allows it to bring in its train the skeptical point about fundamental limitations on our knowledge, famously granting "the truth in skepticism," i.e. that our relation to the world "may not be one of knowing – or at least what we think of as knowing." So the skeptic wins; but then the victory turns to ashes from a Cartesian point of view, as Cavell proceeds to reinterpret its significance profoundly. So while he and McDowell may not easily be seen to agree on doctrine, or even on Wittgenstein interpretation, their views may yet be seen as helpfully complementary.

McDowell, Davidson and truth

James at spontaneity&receptivity, that new McDowell-centered blog I mentioned the other day, wonders about McDowell's possible adherence to something called "the identity theory of truth." Here are a few (okay, more than a few) thoughts on the matter.

Truth is obviously a central notion for philosophers. It has seemed natural, nay obligatory, to try to provide a theory or at least a definition of truth. That's what philosophers do, isn't it? Unless you think that truth doesn't exist – and how could anyone think that? – then the word refers to something, and the task of metaphysics (ontology) is to say what there is, and that includes truth. That's the thought, anyway.

So we have the "correspondence theory of truth," the "coherence theory," etc. The problem with these accounts, generally speaking, is that they take us one step forward and two steps back. So truth is "correspondence" between true statement and fact. What does that mean? What sort of mysterious metaphysical relation could this "correspondence" be? And how is it supposed to explain the concept of truth?

On Davidson's view, the concept of truth is "admirably clear" compared with anything we might use to explain it (or, as I like to say, perhaps to show off my Latin, theories or definitions of truth are necessarily per oscurius). Consequently, he is sometimes described as having "taken truth as primitive." I don't think this is quite right. It's true that one of the key moves in his early work on semantics is the switch from a) providing a Tarski-style theory of truth for a language in terms of T-sentences, to b) "holding truth constant and solving for meaning," giving the meaning of each of the quoted sentences on the left-hand side of those T-sentences in terms of their truth-conditions ("grass is green" is true iff grass is green). The result, then, is a theory of meaning, one which has the virtue (for Quineans such as the early Davidson) of being extensional (and thus in principle empirically verifiable).

But "holding truth constant and solving for meaning" isn't the same as "taking truth as primitive," even given Davidson's reluctance to provide a theory of truth. It's not that we can't say anything about this ineffable concept; it's that whatever we do say would not be intelligible to anyone who did not already understand the concept of truth (enough, that is, to know what a "definition" or "theory" or even "statement" is). It is in this sense that truth is "central."

Supposedly following Davidson (but not exactly claiming agreement – see "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth"), Rorty sometimes talks as if he endorses a "deflationary theory" of truth, which consists simply in what we like to call the "disquotational platitude": "p" is true iff p. (I really should use Quinean square brackets here, but you know what I mean.) This is supposed to put all that tendentious metaphysics behind us; but while it's certainly true that (say) the English sentence "grass is green" is true just because grass is indeed green, that doesn't mean the "deflationary theory of truth" is of any use to us. Rather than spurning the very idea of providing a "theory" for a concept that cannot support one, the "deflationary theory" makes it look as if we have indeed provided one, without in fact telling us anything. (See also, but without taking what he says there to be that important, Crispin Wright's argument, in Truth and Objectivity, that "deflationism reinflates.")

So what about the "identity theory" of truth? James points us to Stewart Candish's article at SEP, which he quotes as saying at one point that “One such pressure [i.e. in favor of this theory] is the wish that there should be no gap between mind and world: that when we think truly, we think what is the case.” And of course McDowell says things very much like this all the time (James has a typical quote from M & W), and for that very reason: that we not be misled into thinking that there is a metaphysical gap between mind and world, such that (say) we should attempt to construct over it a philosophical bridge. In McDowell's thinking (though he does not put it this way), that would be to try to build a bridge between the two peaks of Kilimanjaro, a (philosophically) suicidal undertaking.

As commenter Tom rightly points out, though, while McDowell is indeed willing to accept the "identity theory" in these terms (Tom points us to McDowell's replies in Willaschek, ed., Reason and Nature, even giving a link to a pdf), his position (as Tom puts it) "seems to be another 'quietistic' one, that the identity theory is a truism and not really a theory in the philosophical sense at all." Why bother affirming it then? McDowell now (p. 94): "Just that keeping it in view helps to prevent unprofitable philosophical anxieties from arising."

So far, so good – the "quietist" refusal even to take on the theoretical requirements seemingly foisted on us simply by employing the Cartesian picture is an important part of McDowell's conception of his Wittgensteinian heritage. But still, when such a "truism" is something of which we must be reminded, it seems that we might indeed take a close look (closer, paradoxically, than one at that of "truisms" usually rewards) at its content (or, better, its (overlooked or misunderstood) consequences) in our context. That is, we might look at it, for the moment, as if it were a "doctrine" or "theory" after all. (It is McDowell himself who reminds Rorty that, and I forget the exact quote, traditional philosophy has resources Rorty overlooks – that is, for combating the confusions of traditional philosophy itself.)

But it is not as the "identity theory of truth" that I think we should look at it. Here's what the SEP article says, in an introductory section, about this theory:

The simplest and most general statement of the identity theory of truth is that when a truth-bearer (e.g., a proposition) is true, there is a truth-maker (e.g., a fact) with which it is identical and the truth of the former consists in its identity with the latter. The theory is best understood as a reaction to the correspondence theory, according to which the relation of truth-bearer to truth-maker is correspondence. A correspondence theory is vulnerable to the nagging suspicion that if the best we can do is make statements that merely correspond to the truth, then we inevitably fail to capture the reality they are about and thus fall short of the truth we aim at. An identity theory is designed to overcome this suspicion.

This doesn't sound right at all to me. I'm not denying that people do indeed talk this way, as Candish claims they do. But it won't work for our purposes. For one thing, that's not the problem with the "correspondence" theory, or at least that's not the best way to put it. In fact I'm surprised that this slipped past the editors. What's that "nagging suspicion" again? The correspondence theory is an account of what it is in which the truth of true statements consists (assuming, of course, that it is indeed of statements that truth is to be predicated). When we speak truly, then, what we say "corresponds" to how things are; and historically it has been this account which has (e.g. as laid out in Aristotle: "to say of what is not, that it is not, or of what is, that it is, is true"), been regarded as virtually truistic. So when we do "the best we can," what happens is not that we "make statements that merely correspond to the truth"; what happens is that we speak the truth, which "corresponds" not to the truth, which we have, but to how things are.

So what's the problem? I presented it above, as Davidson does, as being that the idea of "correspondence" is impossible to cash out intelligibly (i.e., as an informative theory of truth). Candish presents it here as being an essentially skeptical worry (so that he should say that the worry is that even when we speak the truth, all we do is make statements that "merely correspond" to how things are). That's not exactly wrong, but it deflects attention from the real problem (i.e. with giving a "theory of truth" in the first place) to what is at least a slightly different one. Rorty does this too: he equates the idea of "correspondence" with the dualistic conception it is (usually) meant to illuminate (or at least manifest). That is, he essentially allows the correspondence theorist intelligibly to advocate a theory Rorty believes false or problematic: that when we speak truly, we make statements that describe a reality which is ontologically detached from, or transcends, anything to which it seems that we can be sure of having epistemic access. In other words, he equates it with metaphysical realism.

This makes it look like the skeptical difficulties into which that position "inevitably falls," as Kant puts it, are problems concerning the notion of truth, and that we need therefore to deny or redefine that notion, or downplay its importance. But it is important, and (as Davidson protests) even central – and it certainly should not be redefined as "that which our contemporaries let us get away with"! (How can someone who claims such inspiration from Davidson – even to the point of defining pragmatism in Davidsonian terms, as trying to do away with the scheme-content dualism – say such a thing??) [Actually I have an answer to this one...]

They are instead, these skeptical difficulties, due of course not to the very idea of "correspondence" – which in its truistic form says pretty much what we said before: that when we think truly, we think what is the case – but to its characteristically Cartesian metaphysical perversion. (So to rescue it, all we need do is, as Wittgenstein would say, to retrieve it "from its metaphysical to its everyday use.") At root, then, the problem here is the Cartesian picture itself, with its metaphysical dualism of subject and object. One aspect of our attack will then be, if perhaps not straightforwardly described as a metaphysical theory of our own, at least something which takes place on a characteristically metaphysical battlefield (as in Kant and Hegel; which partly explains McDowell's interest in these thinkers).

It is with this in mind – that our concern is with multiple manifestations of the same fundamental Cartesian confusion – that we should handle the concept of truth. That is, while it is true that one manifestation of that disease is a metaphilosophical compulsion to lay down specific requirements [see PI § 107 and environs, discussed below] or constructive tasks for our philosophical theories to fulfill, another head of that same hydra is the realistic/skeptical metaphysics/epistemology that complements that compulsion at the ground-philosophical level. In other words, I think we can kill two birds with one stone; or, better, show, by killing them with simply the one stone differently construed, that there was just the one Übervogel after all. Going back to our above context, this means seeing what does the work of what might otherwise seem to be (just another) metaphysical theory – a non-dualistic one – as at the same time the straightforward consequences of a mere truism, newly recognized as such. If the "identity theory" of truth isn't even seen as a truistic non-theory, as it seems Candish would have it, then we aren't left with either one of the two things I want us to bring together. It asks us to put just the wrong spin on the dictum "when we think truly, we think what is the case" – however true that dictum may be.

Okay, so let's get back to it. What, then, are the supposedly overlooked, momentous-but-not-necessarily-theoretical consequences of the "truism" that when we think truly, what we think is the case?

While he does resist the call for a "theory of truth," Davidson, unlike McDowell, does not put the point in the Wittgensteinian terms of the salutary effect of reminding ourselves of forgotten truisms. Instead, as I began to discuss above, he trades that purported obligation for his preferred project, a theory of meaning. For Davidson, as we shall see, truth is the transparent conceptual link between what we mean and how things are. We might say, then, that for Davidson truth is a semantic notion, not a metaphysical one. Indeed, a key article of Tarski's to which Davidson refers is called "The Semantic Conception of Truth." But (again) what Davidson says is best considered not w/r/t the form of its treatment of truth, but instead the content of that of meaning. It is when we understand the latter that we will be able to see the former in its properly truistic light (as in McDowell).

Davidson can naturally be read as a semantic externalist. But his externalism is not the metaphysically realistic kind, like that of Kripke et al. As early as "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Davidson says (let me quote the stirring conclusion):

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. [Inquiries, p. 198]

Compare his criticism of Quine in "Meaning, Truth, and Evidence," in which Davidson makes a corresponding move. Here he rejects Quine's explanation of meaning and content in terms of the "firings of sensory nerves" (Truth, Language, and History, p. 47.) Instead of this "proximal" theory, Davidson substitutes a "distal" theory, where the relevant content-bestowing cause of our belief and/or utterance is (say) not the sensations which are (in fact, when they are) caused by a rabbit, but instead the rabbit itself. Just as the content of our thought is not so far removed from us as a potentially, or indeed inevitably, inaccessible world-in-itself, it is also not so near as the excitations of our sensory surfaces. As Davidson points out, "proximal theories, no matter how decked out, are Cartesian in spirit and consequence" (p. 58). The problem with seeing the senses as "epistemic intermediaries," he says, um, somewhere else, is that "we cannot swear them to truthfulness," and skepticism is again the unexpected result.

We must pass over the best part of Davidson's (later) account, which he explains in the often misunderstood terms of a semantic/epistemic "triangulation" among inquirer, interpreter, and world. Let's cut directly to the bottom line in this context. Once the idea of explaining meaning in terms of truth-conditions, and semantic externalism generally, is rescued from the imputation of a perverse Kripkean realism, it becomes clear how the semantic content of what we say can indeed be provided by the "external" world. At the same time, the world to which we answer (semantically and epistemically) is, in McDowell's terms now, nothing more independent of us, in the relevant sense, than "the world as it figures in our world view," a locution meant to fit with its Kantian/Hegelian counterpart in Mind and World, i.e. the "unboundedness of the conceptual realm," which can now (if not before) be seen as having no more idealistic consequences than the former did skeptical ones.

In other words, again, the thought is perfectly symmetrical. Let us not be distracted by the qualifications I have added; they merely reflect the holistic and contextual constraints on interpretation and inquiry revealed by the triangulatory account.

What X means (in my mouth at a certain time) is how things are when X (so construed in that context) is true.

By the same token, again, turning the thought around: just as what I mean cannot be conceptually detached from how things are, how things are cannot "transcend" my meanings. How things are can, of course, "transcend," in a perfectly ordinary sense, my knowledge; but that's different. All that means is that sometimes I speak or believe falsely, and sometimes I don't know how things are; and sometimes I simply don't know what to say. But even when I speak falsely, what I mean is how things would be if I had instead spoken truly. There's no reason to think that what I don't know must be thought of in this metaphysically transcendent way – even if there are things I can never know. That impossible sense of "transcendence" is a gratuitous Cartesian addition.

So while there is a certain sort of unobjectionable realism here, it cannot lead to the sort of skepticism we feared, due to the lack of the necessary metaphysical "gap." (Ignorance, even necessary ignorance, is not a metaphysically loaded state of affairs.) McDowell himself calls his view "naturalized platonism" rather than "domesticated realism," perhaps because of the plethora of similarly modified "realisms" of the past – "empirical" realism, "internal" realism, "external" realism, "scientific" realism, "pragmatic" realism, "common sense" realism – none of which have panned out, and some of which simply repeat the errors of metaphysical realism in a new register. And in fact this lines up with my own usage, as I tend to use the term "realism" only for the bad kind, and for the same reason. (Still, "platonism," ugh; and "naturalized," no less: double ugh.)

And if there is no gap, then there is no need for philosophy to construct theoretical bridges over them. Let me conclude by once again recommending the attempt to bring about in oneself a "Magic Eye" sort of shift in perception here. When Davidson is criticizing Quine, there is no question of (what would in that context seem to be) a limply quietistic retreat to the mere reaffirmation of non-theoretical platitudes. Davidson thinks Quine is wrong and he is right, about, well, meaning, truth, and evidence. He refers, after all, to the combating positions as proximal and distal "theories," and gives arguments (convincing ones, even) for the truth of the latter. But just as in "Very Idea," Davidson's ultimate opponent is the metaphysically dualistic Cartesian picture – the very one which, in the metaphilosophical context, it can be effective to combat by resisting the characteristically Cartesian temptations to "constructive" philosophy against which (McDowell's) Wittgenstein warns.

So seeing (a properly "theoretical" reason) why there is no metaphysical gap can be the same thing, in the end, as seeing a reason to reject the seeming requirement to cross a metaphilosophical gap: i.e., that between naïve pre-philosophical ("truistic") intuition over here and solidly grounded philosophical results over there. Even better: it is the very rejection of scheme and content which Davidson's theory of meaning and interpretation demands which allows us to see it, qua theoretical, as not inconsistent with (as if we had to choose a single "scheme"), but simply another way of grasping, the anti-dualistic confluence of mind and world which licenses rejection of Cartesian philosophical requirements. It is no accident that a favorite quotation of McDowell's from Philosophical Investigations (§95, excerpted: "When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but we mean: this—is—so") comes a mere page before Wittgenstein indicts those – including his former self (§114) – who would read the forms of our language back into philosophy as supplying an ideal which must be found in our philosophical accounts of reality as well; see e.g. §101: "We want to say that there can't be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal 'must' be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this "must". We think it must be in reality; for we think we see it there." §107 contrasts the actual use of language with the picture implied by the requirement (and vice versa); and soon we are into the heart of the Investigations' call for a rethinking of the entire idea of thinking philosophically.

Wheels within wheels

Today is April 1, which (for the benefit of those from distant locales, spambots or no) we in the U. S. of A. celebrate by playing practical jokes on each other. (I believe that in France they have "poisson d'avril" or some such.) So today I was interested to read of an elaborate stunt that some wiseacres have played on us.

I need to back up a bit. I haven't commented on it, but one extended skirmish in the evolution wars over the past few weeks has been between one Dr. Michael Egnor, a purported neurosurgeon, on the ID side, and various interblogutors on the other, many from scienceblogs (see here and here, for example).

But today it was revealed that the whole thing was a joke:

Over the past month I [i.e., "Egnor"] have engaged in what my friend Bill Dembski ludicly refers to as "street theatre". My posts here [i.e., on the Discovery Institute blog] have been an outlandish parody of the bona fide Intelligent Design position, liberally injected with many of the more simplistic errors of the Young Earth Creationists. My purpose was to see how far we could go before the gullible Darwinists realized they were being taken for a ride. The Discovery Institute has graciously aided (and abetted!) by allowing me a voice on this weblog and by giving me valuable feedback on my comedic output. Together, we have succeeded in duping the Darwinists (like the foul-mouthed duncecaps at the Panda's Thumb and Scienceblogs).

At The Panda's Thumb we find a sporting tip of the cap to the prankster(s), and PZ at Pharyngula is equally red-faced.

So, ha ha? Not so fast. If this is a joke by the Discovery Institute, it's hard to see the point of it. As Mark CC's post (first scienceblogs link above, at Good Math, Bad Math) shows, "Egnor's" misunderstandings of the relevant concept of information are sadly typical and not at all susceptible to the "you actually thought I believed that? Whatta maroon!" treatment. In fact they pretty much hew to the standard ID line on the matter; as does a lot of the rest of what "Egnor" says. And as commenters at PT/PZ point out, if it's hard to tell deliberate balderdash from arguments in earnest, that could just as easily say something about those arguments in earnest as it was supposed to say about those too dense to tell them apart.

Other commenters at these pages – more suspicious, more sharp-eyed, or at least more awake than the rest of us – tell us to take a closer look at the page on which the hoax is revealed. It sure looks like the DI blog ... but instead of "Discovery Institute" it says "Discover"; the trackback URL is to "www.disocvery.org"; the page is called "Evolution Views & News" instead of "News & Views"; and, at bottom below the trackback, the blurb says "Evolution Views & News presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers misinformation [!] about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution" ... although the subsequent link is indeed to the real DI blog (evolutionnews.org, that is, rather than evolutionnews.net). Lastly (or is it?), the figure in the logo seems to be wearing an eyepatch (and may thus, if I am up to date on these matters, be a closet Pastafarian).

So, what we have here is in fact (as Maxwell Smart would say), the old fake hoax trick. Unless it itself is a hoax too (the old ersatz fake hoax trick?). In any case, the real entry for Evolution News & Views is here, credited, as it happens, to Dr. Michael Egnor. So is he spoofing us too? Let's take a look.

The post begins with a swipe at materialism. Not surprisingly, Dr. Egnor is not an advocate of this position (i.e., physicalism). Amazingly enough, we agree on this point. Physicalism is a form of metaphysical substance monism: everything that exists is composed of a single substance type -- matter. Its natural opponent is substance dualism, most famously in Descartes. But as I've said before, substance dualism is only the most superficial manifestation of Cartesian subject/object dualism. Once we resolve to stop plucking the dandelion and go for the roots (whether or not we go on to trade them for a rhizome), physicalism is no longer well-motivated. In fact it preserves the dualistic opposition in its negative form (as, similarly, do most forms of several other doctrines: skepticism, empiricism, anti-realism, and a bit further away, consequentialism). The actual dualistic error is the urge to ground the manifest qualitative difference between normative and causal explanations of everyday facts in a corresponding metaphysical difference between types of substance. In resisting this error in the way they do – by affirming a single substance-type and grounding the appearances in it and its various manifestations, it seems to me that physicalists themselves succumb to the pernicious urge.

What this post needs now, I feel, is (hold onto your hats) a lengthy quotation from John McDowell. As he puts it in his awesome paper "Functionalism and Anomalous Monism" (originally from Actions and Events, the second volume of papers from a marathon Davidson conference in 1985, which is out of print, but the paper is now available here as well):

It is quite intelligible [he says in response to an argument of Brian Loar] that [substance dualism] should seem to be [the] basic flaw [of the Cartesian picture], and consequently that a "physicalist" conception of the inner should seem to be exactly what we need instead. But [...] I think this account of the Cartesian picture does not go deep enough; and if we go deeper, this apparent recommendation for "physicalism" disappears.

What is fundamentally at issue is the pull of the idea that reality is objective, in the sense of being fully describable from no particular point of view. [footnote: Nagel's article "Subjective and objective"] This idea is in tension with a natural intuition to the effect that the mental is both real and essentially subjective [in the relevant sense]. Cartesian [substance] dualism results from trying to put these forces in equilibrium: the subjectivity of the mental is (supposedly) accommodated by the idea of privileged access, while the object of that access is conceived, in conformity with the supposed requirement of objectivity, as there independently – there in a reality describable from no particular point of view – rather than as being constituted by the subject's special access to it. [footnote: B. Williams's book on Descartes] Since there is no plausibility in the idea that one could have the appropriate kind of special access to something "physical," the upshot is the notion of a non-"physical" substance.

This account of what generates the Cartesian picture of the inner suggests that to recoil from Cartesian dualism into "physicalism" may be to avoid only a superficial defect; it may be that the fundamental flaw is the attempt to force the mental into an objective mould, something still plainly operative in the supposedly healthy position in which this recoil leaves one. (pp. 394-5 in original; [fetches other volume] 335-6 in the McDowell collection, from which see also "Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World," another corker)

But as you might imagine that's not Dr. Egnor's route (remember him?) to the rejection of physicalism. Here's sentence four of his post:

[M]aterialism is nonsense, because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn't exist (it's neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn't exist, then materialism can't be true.

Wow. Now let this be a lesson to you (should you need same): a true conclusion does not a non-ridiculous argument make.

But wait! Perhaps he too is joking. Sadly, I believe that he is not. Once again, this is too close to the actual ID line on the matter for the joke to have much point. I think Alvin Plantinga (a philosopher, even, to the shame of our guild) says something like this in his review of Dawkins's book. I'll stop now, but maybe we can pick this up again some time, like when there is no question of spoiling the joke.

UPDATE [4/6]: I missed this accompanying post at the Panda's Thumb, which either does or does not confirm my verdict about Egnor's post.

Too rich for my blood

My previous post (eventually) ended up talking about the review at Amazon's page of a particular book. It might interest you to know that at that page, one used copy of The Sokal Hoax lists for $399.98. The same seller has another listing for the same book, this one for a mere $99.98. Both (perhaps the same copy?) are described as Used – Good (so if it were Excellent, that would presumably cost more, yes?). The natural question (which someone has surely addressed somewhere) is of course: why would anyone bother trying to sell this book for four hundred dollars? The book is in print, and Amazon is selling it new for $15.60 ($4.40 off the $20 list price) plus shipping (FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25). So why bother asking, um, $384.38 more (plus $3.49 shipping, no less)? After all, if you clicked on the button that says "25 used & new from $5.58," it was because you didn't want to pay $15.60 for a new one. Even $99.98 seems a bit much for a twenty-dollar book. Maybe Sokal signed it in his own blood (eww).

That's not the highest price I've ever seen for a book, either. I saw one on Bookfinder for over $1000 (that one might actually have been out of print though). But even in normal cases – books in print with $20-$40 list prices – there are always used copies selling for much more, with no explanation. What, I demand in colloquial English, is up with that?

By the way, due to its long shaggy-dog excursus into Tractarian territory, my post has garnered comment from the proprietors of two Wittgenstein-oriented blogs which are new to me (and if anyone knows any more, then let that person speak forth), and which I have added to the blogroll: Methods of Projection and Tractatus Blogico-Philosophicus (heh). If (but not only if) you are looking for more heavily LW-saturated blogging than there is here (despite the name, I am just as much influenced by Davidson and McDowell as by LW), check 'em out! While you're at it check out The Space of Reasons, a new blog dedicated to McDowell's epistemology (about which I might eventually have something to say as well ...).

[Update (3/5): another blog new to me has linked up as well - Words and Other Things]

Rorty and his critics (warning: this is a long 'un)

[X-posted to The Valve; I imagine more and better comments will be over there (once everyone's had time to plough through it), so if you got here from somewhere else, be sure to check over there too.]

John [Holbo, head Valvester] has invited me to say a bit more about the (R. Brandom, ed.) Rorty and his Critics collection we both like, for those interested (the rest of you can go back to arguing about whether Nabokov was a perv, or a robot, or whatever). I was going to say "dragooned," but I must admit I'm always up for talking about Rorty and his critics (seeing as the latter group includes me, me, me). And I see that I have written a bit more than "a bit." Oh well.

The Brandom volume came out in 2000. There are of course a number of previous books collecting critical responses to Rorty, including this one from 1990, and this one, from 1995. These critics, however, tend to be unsympathetic ones, and unsympathetic critics are not only less interesting to begin with, but bring out the worst in Rorty, who replies (in the second collection) in kind, i.e., less with careful engagement than with more of the same and then some. There are two basic kinds of unsympathetic critic. First we have realists who want to remind us that "yes, Virginia, there is a real world" (an actual title, as I recall, although this particular essay is not included in either of these books), and that relativism is self-refuting (an essay in the former collection is called "Auto-da-Fe"). The second group of critics is made up of scrupulous scholars of American pragmatism, outraged at Rorty's "creative misreadings" of their guys (esp. Dewey; Peirce is not so much "creatively misread" in Rorty as he is dissed and abandoned), and in service of (what they see as) a facile postmodern relativism to boot (as opposed to Dewey's, and Peirce's, explicitly scientific and experimental approach; Peirce was a working scientist, you know). And of course we also have critics on Rorty's political left, frustrated with the "piecemeal nudging" of reform and downright conventionalist quietism they see in his self-attributed "postmodern bourgeois liberalism" (compare criticism of Gadamer, as well as Wittgenstein, on similar or at least analogous grounds).

Now of course none of these groups is entirely wrong (I will not discuss the third). In my view as well, Rorty has never given a completely satisfactory answer to the charge that his views are, if this is how we want to put the point, insufficiently realistic; and of course 1990 is ten years earlier than 2000. I also agree with the second group that when we are concerned with what Dewey was actually up to, we should turn to Ralph Sleeper or Thomas Alexander rather than Rorty; but that doesn't mean that Rorty's use of Dewey doesn't help illuminate his own views, which should be evaluated on their own merits, and not with a set of Deweyan or Peircean doctrines already in place, which would allow us to elide failure to get Dewey or Peirce right with failure to get the world right.

I should also mention two other books. The single best response to Rorty's early views (that is, his early pragmatist views, not his even earlier materialism) is the essay on Rorty in Thomas McCarthy's book (his being a Habermas scholar notwithstanding); and if you are interested in these matters but think the Brandom volume might be too advanced for you (it is indeed difficult; but so is philosophy), I recommend this recent collection, which shares some of the same virtues, but is intended as an introductory book. In fact I think I'll read it again after I finish this.

But our topic today is the Brandom book. I won't discuss every essay, but zoom in on a few important topics addressed by a few of them, and say why I think this book is more than just a good book on Rorty.


Everybody knows that Descartes believed that mind and matter were two different substances. That meant that our beliefs, qua mental states, were "in here" while the world they purport to represent is "out there," such that the former are true if they "correspond" to the latter. Substance dualism is a tough sell for various reasons, but even when materialism became the dominant view, the Cartesian conception of
mind remained (although now thought of as a state of the physical world). The dualism changed from one of different substances (subject and object) to one of different points of view (subjective and objective). Belief remained a subjective representation of objective reality; and so the metaphysical dualism remained, even if not in "substance" form.

Descartes did not invent the philosophical problem of skepticism, but simply put it in a new and pressing form (the ancient skeptics agreed that objective knowledge was impossible, but basically told us to chill out about it – just accept the appearances and get on with your life). The Cartesian conception of mind presents an intolerable paradox: either we have no knowledge at all of the "external" world, not even that it exists, or we must show that we can bridge the epistemic gap between incorrigible subjective states (sense data and the a priori) and the objective world beyond. But no such bridge seems possible. Yet it is impossible simply to give up our beliefs as unjustified and unjustifiable, even in the face of this problem.

The most common responses to this paradox are 1) dogmatism, i.e., continuing to argue (or just assume) that the gap is crossable, and trying to shift the burden of proof back onto the skeptic; and 2) relativism, i.e., admitting the gap is uncrossable, even inconceivable, leaving each subject with his or her own "truth" faute de mieux, as that's all there is. The first leaves us with a possibly hopeless and maybe even incoherent aspiration to ground our beliefs; but the latter leaves our beliefs ungrounded and even themselves incoherent qua belief about a world beyond the subject.

Rorty tries another tack. As he sees it, the problem lies in the idea that our beliefs need "grounding," if that means seeing them as achieving "objectivity," which he agrees is either impossible or incoherent (he goes back and forth as to which). Yet he agrees that relativism is incoherent as well. So how are we to know what to believe, if we can't just believe whatever we want? Sounding a bit like the ancient skeptics here, Rorty suggests that the only "grounding" our beliefs need is in our practices as they stand. That is, if it is inherent in the very concept of belief that it points beyond the subjective realm – which is what makes relativism incoherent (how can a relativist really be said to "believe" anything?) – and we cannot see it as grounded in an inconceivable "correspondence" to an "objective" world (as we cannot jump out of our skins, as if to attain a "view from nowhere"), then let us turn to a third, intermediate realm: the intersubjective.

I won't rehearse Rorty's arguments and slogans here (see his collection of mid-1980's papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, for his most concerted effort to defend them properly), but we should take a look at his often-misconstrued "ethnocentrism" (a word I'm surprised he uses for his view; but see his response to Clifford Geertz, who himself uses the word quite differently, in the above collection). The idea is that we avoid relativism by recognizing normative constraints on our beliefs (we can't believe just anything if we are to be rational), but also avoid realism by recognizing that these norms come not from "the world itself" but from our fellows. The norms of justification vary from culture to culture, so whose norms should we use? If we are not to derive them a priori, nor to abandon them entirely, we can only answer: ours. These norms are revisable, not dogmatic; and that process of revision is itself subject to an ideal of free and unforced agreement, indeed open-ended conversation, appropriately enough if one considers one's own "ethnos" to be that of post-Deweyan "wet liberals" committed primarily to democracy and the avoidance of cruelty (rather than the accumulation of ideally accurate representations of objective reality, or of fealty to the One True Faith, or whatever).

We should thus reject "representationalism," and see our inscriptions and utterances as just one more set of tools for coping with the world, as it is the subject-object dualism lingering in that picture which causes the endless cycles of realism and anti-realism which have characterized the philosophy of the last century (I almost wrote "this century," which is of course what Rorty called it at the time). In other words, again, we should turn away from the world (i.e., so considered, as the object of our subjective representations) and toward our fellow inquirers, as it is to them and not to it that we are obliged. We thus abandon "capital-P Philosophy" as manifested in the traditional problems, and turn instead to our practices themselves, without worrying about grounding them transcendentally.

This is what provokes Rorty's turn to Deweyan conceptions of democracy as the political arm of philosophical pragmatism ("The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in ORT), and his favoring of Gadamerian Horizontverschmelzung over the Habermasian obsession with somehow locating the key to an "ideal speech situation" in Critical (i.e., philosophical) Theory rather than implicit in practice itself. There is a back-and-forth-and-back between Rorty and Habermas in Rorty and his Critics, but that's not what I'm going to discuss here. (For some specifically Deweyan criticism of Rorty's treatment of Dewey, see Rorty and Pragmatism, the 1995 collection I linked above, esp. James Gouinlock's contribution.)

As the reference to Gadamer vs. Habermas might suggest, most critics see Rorty's "ethnocentrism" as just another kind of conventionalism, the left lamenting the loss of critical leverage against tyrannical consensus, and the right bewailing the loss of transcendent objectivity. In either case, they often suggest that Rorty's views sound suspiciously like Orwell's O'Brien, who as I recall actually cops to (metaphysical) "idealism," seeing "realists" like Winston as naive. Rorty has addressed the Orwell issue in "The last intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty" (in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), and in the Brandom collection James Conant has a typically lengthy and footnote-ridden article in response, which makes some excellent points, and is worth reading until you just can't get any farther, which should be about halfway through. Rorty defends himself surprisingly ably in response.


While Conant is the most detailed in his case for the view that, even in attempting to navigate a middle path, Rorty falls off to the relativist side (that is, he fails even by his own lights, a common charge among the commentators here), other commentators are more effective, even provoking unprecedented concessions which will, or should, or so I claim, be the focus of all subsequent Rorty scholarship, as I think Rorty would agree.

Bjørn Ramberg is the author of a fine book, Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: short, introductory, and yet substantive, although as a 1988 release it misses important developments in Davidson's philosophy since then. He also wrote the entry on hermeneutics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; and while we're over there we might as well check out Jeff Malpas's article on Davidson.

"Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson," Ramberg's article in Rorty and his Critics, is itself well worth reading, but it is Rorty's response that is the most compelling reading in the book. (Portions of this response, Rorty tells us, come from "Davidson between Wittgenstein and Tarski" (Critica 1998; Davidson's reply is available online here (scroll down) and on paper here; unfortunately, at the moment at least, the online archives at Critica go back only to this very issue, not the one in which the articles appear to which he is responding.)

Get this. "Ramberg," Rorty says in his response (p. 375), "has persuaded me to abandon two doctrines which I have been preaching for years: that the notion of 'getting things right' must be abandoned, and that 'true of' and 'refers to' are not word-world relations." More specifically, "it was a mistake on my part to go from criticism of attempts to define truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality to a denial that true statements get things right" [374]. He explains this realization in the Davidsonian terms Ramberg had used – in particular, the later-Davidsonian picture of interpretation/inquiry (my slash) as a triangle with vertices of speaker, interpreter, and world. This is the key to Davidson, and for that reason I won't make a big deal out of my quibbles with the details of Rorty's long overdue mea culpa.

But let's at least look at them, and finish up by considering, in the context of three more articles in Rorty and his Critics, the effect of this doctrinal shift on one more key issue: the value of truth in inquiry. Consider Rorty's answer, immediately following the above concession to Ramberg [p. 375] to the following question he naturally asks himself: "How many of my previous positions – positions criticized by McDowell, Dennett, and others in this volume – am I now forced to give up?" That answer? "Not many. Here are some doctrines which remain unaffected:

"1. No area of culture, and no period of history, gets Reality more right than any other [as there is] no such thing as Reality."

Okay, but you won't like the subsequent exegesis, which still sounds antirealist.

"2. Pace McDowell, there is no second norm given us by the facts, in addition to the norms given us by our peers."

Here the brief explanation looks fine – except one thing: in the sense in which it is correct, there's no reason to take McDowell as disagreeing with it. I'll talk a bit about McDowell's article below.

"3. To say that we get snow mostly right [i.e., for Davidsonian reasons] is not to say that we represent snow with reasonable accuracy ... The holism of intentional ascription forbids any such talk."

Poppycock. Representation, like correspondence and objectivity, can be perfectly well domesticated. If you don't think we get snow right, then say so, and give us a better account. Perhaps naturally, after making such a big concession, Rorty is still concerned with minimizing what he is forced to say rather than with deciding what he still wants to say (or avoid saying).

"4. I [...] still maintain that there is no such thing as the search for truth, as distinct from the search for happiness [ = "getting more of the things we keep developing new descriptive vocabularies to get"]. There is no authority called Reality before whom we need bow down."

Yes, yes, realism is false. We get it. Note the dualistic form here, which is really what we should be jettisoning: our goal, he says, is not truth – that would be Realism! – but instead happiness (as if embracing the one still involved abandoning the other). Yet to be entitled to the Davidsonian picture, I would argue that we must reinstate truth – given its role there – as a goal. After all, if we want to know whether snow is white, doesn't that mean, given its meaning, we are ipso facto concerned with the truth of "snow is white"? Answer: sure we are. I'll say this again in a second.

So this is a big step for Rorty, but it seems he has not yet internalized this shift in doctrine (which, given all the rest of his views, may take some time to do). It is with this in mind that the other papers and responses should be read (some of which were written before 1998, but if Rorty wanted to change his responses he would have said so, either there or in the response to Ramberg).


In "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson vs. Crispin Wright" (1995, so pre-Ramberg; but this part seems to be something Rorty has not retracted (see #4 above); reprinted in Truth and Progress), Rorty elaborates his view in the following way (T & P, p. 39).

Some Davidsonians might see no reason why they too [i.e., as Wright does] should not say, ringingly, robustly, and commonsensically, that the goal of inquiry is truth. But they cannot say this without misleading the public. For when they go on to add that they are, of course, not saying that the goal of inquiry is correspondence to the intrinsic nature of things [i.e., metaphysical realism], the common sense of the vulgar will feel betrayed [footnote: for an example see such-and-such typical realist griping from Searle and Rorty's reply]. For "truth" sounds like the name of a goal only if it is thought to name a fixed goal – that is, if progress toward truth is explicated by reference to a metaphysical picture, that of getting closer to what Bernard Williams calls [in his book on Descartes, I believe] "what is there anyway." Without that picture, to say that truth is our goal is merely to say something like: we hope to justify our belief to as many and as large audiences as possible. But to say that is to offer only an ever-retreating goal, one that fades forever and forever when we move. It is not what common sense would call a goal. For it is neither something we might realize we had reached, nor something to which we might get closer.

So instead of saying truth is our goal, because we can't tell when we have reached it, Rorty would have us say instead that justification is our goal, not truth. Now as you may know Rorty has been trying to get Davidson to go pragmatist in one way or another for many years. So prepare yourselves for another landmark in RahC. Davidson has resisted (as well he might) any "pragmatist theory of truth" In which truth just is "the good in the way of belief" (James) or something "good to steer by" (Dewey); but in "Truth Rehabilitated" (RahC pp. 65-73), he finally joins Rorty in this "somewhat tamer, but clearly recognizable, version" (p. 67):

What is clearly right is a point made long ago by Plato in the Theaetetus: truths do not come with a "mark," like the date in the corner of some photographs, which distinguishes them from falsehoods. The best we can do is test, experiment, compare, and keep an open mind. [...] We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so the "pursuit of truth" is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations.
From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs are true, pragmatists [i.e., those committed to the "pragmatist theory of truth"] conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth is objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified by all our evidence, believed by our neighbors, or is good to steer by.) But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can't consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal.

Let's not get fuddled by Davidson's use of "pragmatist" here. He thinks of Rorty as a "pragmatist" in the sense he uses it on the basis of Rorty's endorsement someplace or other of the "pragmatist" reduction of truth to utility. But as we have just seen, Rorty endorses both of the last two sentences of this quotation (and is thus not a "pragmatist" in this sense, at least not by 1995). Even without the (later) concession to Ramberg that true statements "get things right," it would surely be pointless for Rorty to say both 1) that truth is not objective, but instead to be identified with utility, and 2) truth is pointless as a goal; for that would mean that utility is pointless as a goal, which is nuts. So in agreeing to (2), we lose any motivation to deny that truth is objective. After all, as Davidson tells it, the whole point of (2) was to improve on (1). But we still have a version of pragmatism here. Compare e.g. Davidson's invocation of the Theaetetus with Peirce's dictum that "the final opinion [his criterion of truth] does not glow in the dark." And of course realists won't want to save the objectivity of truth by giving it up as a goal.

But here's where it gets sticky. For neither do I. (Ironic, isn't it, that after all this time, Davidson and Rorty finally agree on a version of pragmatism ... and it's wrong. Ironic, anyway, for those of us who hoped it would go the other way.) And neither do Akeel Bilgrami [full disclosure: my dissertation adviser at Columbia, not like he necessarily agrees with me on anything besides this] and John McDowell, whose articles here are essential (but not essentialist; that's something else).


Here's my paraphrase of Bilgrami's argument (but don't hold him responsible; read it yourself). For both Rorty and Davidson, the key point that requires that truth not be a goal (almost wrote "gaol"; who's that, Foucault?) is that (as Davidson puts it) "we can never tell which of our beliefs are true" (because, again, they don't come with a "mark" distinguishing them from the false ones). But wait a second. There is indeed a truth in there somewhere; but that's not it. Let's be more careful. We are fallible; our methods of justification do not guarantee that the resulting belief is true. So every believer (that's everybody) has some false beliefs (he thinks they're true, but they're not; because truth is objective and doesn't depend on what we think). Each of us may be required to revise our beliefs in the future, as new evidence comes in.

So far so good. But you have to watch that first-person plural (the very aspect of "ethnocentrism" that was supposed to help us). I can say "we all have some false beliefs" because a) everybody else does, and b) I'm fallible too. But I can't say "I have some false beliefs just like everybody else," for Moorean reasons (Moorean paradox: both "it's raining" and "I believe that it is not raining" may both be true, but to say "It's raining, but I don't believe that it is" makes no sense on any remotely straightforward interpretation). Similarly, you can't say "I can't tell which of my beliefs is true." Try it.
-- How about this one? Is this one true?
-- Of course it is. Everyone knows that.
-- So you can tell. How about that one?
-- Maybe not.
-- Maybe not? It might be false?
-- Maybe.
-- So you're in doubt about it; it's not a "belief" at all. If you believe something, what can that mean but "I have checked this every way I know how (or at least every way I care to) and it is true true true"?

Moral: only on a third-person view of inquiry can we disavow the transparency (in this sense) of belief. From the first-person point of view, an inquirer's beliefs must be true. But that's what each of us is – a first-person inquirer. (Akeel says a lot more, but that's the gist.)

Let's just solve the skeptical problem while we're here. Here comes a skeptic now.
-- Okay, okay, you believe it (he says). But maybe you're wrong about what you believe; you're fallible, aren't you?
-- Yes, I am; I've made mistakes before.
-- So maybe you're wrong this time too.
-- We'll see, won't we. Did you have any of my beliefs in mind?
-- Well, how about this one? Is this one true?
-- Why yes. Yes it is.
-- But it might be false, say if this (admittedly unlikely) situation were the case.
-- It would be then; but we're not in that situation.
-- So you say.
-- Yes I do. Let me ask you: do you believe it?
-- Me?
-- Yes, you. Do you believe that belief of mine?
-- Of course I do. I'm a philosopher, not a moron.
-- So you agree it's true.
-- Yes, but it might not be.
-- It's true, but it might not be true?
-- Okay, wait. No, I don't believe it.
-- You don't? What are you, a moron?
-- No, I just, uh, it might be false.
-- So you say. But if I am to credit you with actually believing that it might be false – that is, that you don't believe it (i.e., in order to be a consistent skeptic) – then you have to act that way, or you're just flapping your mouth. So go ahead, act that way. Go on.
-- Um...
-- See, you can't – they'd lock you up. Congratulations, you're not a moron after all. But you have to give up your skepticism. Either you believe something or you don't; and if you do, you can't be a skeptic; but if you don't, then we're not talking about the truth of our beliefs; we're talking about what to believe. And that's just first-order inquiry, not philosophical reflection. Only Cartesians confuse the two, i.e., those who see philosophy as laying down requirements for our practices, not (as Wittgensteinians say) elucidating them or (as pragmatists say, with Peirce) making them clear (of course that's just what "elucidating" means, isn't it).

Now, where were we? Oh yes – we can too tell when our beliefs are true. To say otherwise is to give them up. But doesn't this require absolute certainty? And wouldn't that be dogmatic? Yes, it would; but all we need do is distinguish between degrees of certainty and types of certainty. Certainty is just the absence of doubt; but the absence of doubt is just belief. So when I believe something, I'm completely or entirely certain; but I'm not "absolutely" certain, if that means something like incorrigibly certain. And all I need to do to avoid that is to pledge to revise my views if new and persuasive evidence comes in; but I was going to do that anyway. So since we can indeed tell when our beliefs are true, there's no reason that truth can't be a goal after all. QED.

Almost done (for today). My favorite article here is McDowell's "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity" (pp. 109-23). (By the way, that may seem short, but the pages are big, with close print. You would have gotten your money's worth with this book, if the price hadn't gone up to $35.99 in paperback.) Covering some of the same territory as Bilgrami, McDowell hits Rorty on the same points, but from a metaphysical rather than an epistemological angle. (This makes sense given McDowell's turn to Kant and Hegel.) As I've already mentioned, there's no point in denying that truth is objective, once we make the necessary pragmatic connection to our practices of inquiry and interpretation (although that connection cannot take the form either of reducing truth to utility or of giving it up as a goal). McDowell elaborates this point, in the context of showing Rorty's "pragmatism" to fail by its own anti-Cartesian lights (that's gotta hurt).

I won't go into the whole McDowellian picture, which would require a detour into Mind and World and a dozen or so of his most important articles (ooh, and the one in here), but let me just give you a taste (pp. 114-5):

Rorty's picture is on these lines. If we use an expression like "accurate representation" in the innocent internal [i.e., to our practices, as in Putnam] way, it can function only as a means of paying "empty compliments" to claims that pass muster within our current practice of claim-making. Now "the representationalist" finds a restriction to this sort of assessment unacceptably parochial. Recoiling from that, "the representationalist" tries to make expressions like "true" or "accurate representation" signify a mode of normative relatedness – conformity – to something more independent of us than the world as it figures in our world view [i.e., as an objective world – one, that is, that does not depend our our thoughts about it – so that what the Cartesian demands is fealty to a world more independent of us even than that; this distinction is McDowell's metaphysical analogue to Bilgrami's "first-person" epistemology, of which McDowell has his own variant]. This aspiration is well captured by Thomas Nagel's image of "trying to climb outside of our own minds" [The View From Nowhere; but of course Nagel – a sap, but a good philosopher nonetheless – thinks that this task, which we should all deplore as irretrievably Cartesian, is "philosophically fundamental"]. The image fits a conception, or supposed conception [there's the Wittgensteinian in McDowell speaking], of reality that threatens to put it outside our reach, since the norms according to which we conduct our investigations cannot of course be anything but our current norms. [...]
This conception is naturally reflected in just the sorts of philosophical wonderment at, for instance, the meaningfulness of language, or the fact that we so much as have an "overall view of the world," that Rorty tellingly deplores. In this conception, being genuinely in touch with reality would in a radical way transcend whatever we can do within our practices of arriving at answers to our questions. Thus a familiar gulf seems to open between us and what we should like to think of ourselves as able to get to know about. And the only alternative, as Rorty sees things, is to take our inquiry not to be subject to anything but the norms of current practice [i.e., as we have seen above]. This picture of the options makes it look as if the very idea of inquiry as normatively beholden not just to current practice but to its subject matter [that is, the idea that we want to "get things right," which Rorty is now willing to equate with "believing true sentences" – but only to abandon both as goals] is inextricably connected with the "Augustinian" picture [i.e. as so described in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations] and the impulse to climb outside of our own minds. But a piece of mere sanity goes missing here.

Ooh, the Devil don't like that kind of preachin' (as Jimmy Swaggart would say, in rather a different context)!

Okay, that's enough for now. Putnam and Dennett have short bits here, and there are also articles from Jacques Bouveresse, Michael Williams, Barry Allen, and the editor himself, all worth reading (but with less gold, by my lights). Check it out!

Thanks to all for reading this far, if you did, and thanks to John for the invite. I'll take questions if you got 'em.